Player Attack gathers together a few clues that some are taking as indications that a high-resolution texture patch for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the "surprise" Bethesda's Pete Hines recently said is coming Tuesday for their RPG sequel. Their evidence is plausible, but by no means concrete.

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 8, 2012, 08:31:sure the requirements are a bit steep, but so are the requirements for metro2033 which is a much nicer looking game, so is whitcher2. try to run it w/uber-sampling, or metro with proper AA so they look their best, and try to find a card that can play it at hi resolution at vsync frames, there's still no single card out there that can play it with solid vsync and proper anti aliasing.

two expensive($5-600) video cards that just came out though with 3gb of vram which will soon be the status quo, and just like when doom3 was around and the ati 9800xt came along that could actually play it with solid frames, there was a new yardstick, from the same game, and video card company too. doom3 looked tits out of the box back then, still looks alright today, but sure was a shitty game after the first hour or so. i'm seeing a pattern here. i admit rage as it is, isn't pretty in spots, but as a world to exist in for a time, it's a very compelling place visually, taken in as a whole. sort of steampunk dr seuss to my eyes, and very rich scenes, but just like doom3 rage blew it's wad early and the gameplay became work just to forward the story.

if id ever bother to do the same thing as bethesda with their supposed massive texture pack i'd probably go back for another run, much like how i'll probably risk another arrow to the knee in skyrim, but from the comparison shots, and the peasely 3gb texture pack size i'm not expecting much. perhaps when the new nvidia offerings come out in the next month or two id might find the effort worthwhile.

I have no disagreement with any of your points. In fact, if you look back on my previous posts, you'll see that I've even defended JohnC's decisions on the tech in Rage, as I know full well that 1-2 years from now the hardware needed to run it at full resolution will be the norm.

All that said, whether I agree and support John's technical decisions is moot, the fact remains that they burned up a lot of goodwill with the PC gaming community, as people with very powerful rigs were learning the hard way about the downside of megatexture, many of which posted here on these very forums.

Megatexture, as I understand it, "bakes in" the art to create a custom super-scale texture for the entire map. By doing so, you lock in the mip level that the engine tells your card it can display same texture in, so things far off may look decent, but things nearby that are a part of that bake, appear, well, like crap. If I remember correctly, John did put in some degree of depth sensitivity, but the algorithms obviously didn't work out for all cards on all machines, hence the "texture popping." I initially ran the game on a 2x8800GTX, which, with 768MB, was probably mid-range (at best); my new card is nearly double that, and things do look better, but not perfect. John chose to balance the engine for future rigs, not the rigs people play with today. Ultimately, judgement as to whether that decision was correct or not rests on him and the staff at id & Zenimax.

Today, though, the truth is, Skyrim does look better on mainstream machines that Rage does. That will change with time, of course, but that's a hard sell to people that were expecting Rage to have eye bleeding visuals when they shelled out $60 for the game, and didn't quite get what they bargained for when they installed it and started playing. The ultimate irony is that the game, in theory, will not only look better on new PCs, but also on the next generation of consoles, provided they keep the unified memory model, and add more RAM into the mix that the compatibility modes can address.

As I said, my only personal disappointment with the game was it's brevity, and the fact that it felt like I only saw one act of a three act play. Gameplay wise, it was great. Mouse control was spot-on and up to id's excellent standards for same. I was a somewhat disappointed in the low degree of interactivity with the environment, and frustrated by the many "invisible walls," the game put up, preventing me from going places I wanted to explore. I was left feeling that while the environment was open, gameplay still felt like it was a bit too much on rails, if you follow my drift.

That said, I can't wait for idTech5 Doom. Everything should be in the sweet spot at that time.

IMO & YMMV.

^D^

PS: I was insanely impressed that the game actually ran on my ion2 NETBOOK. Looked like it was cell-shaded by a 3rd grader, but it ran.

This comment was edited because I still haven't learned to drink my morning cup of coffee before posting.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:And I have a 570 card running on an i7 with 12gigs of RAM, so it's not a "tech" issue. I have more than enough horsepower to run Rage, and it still looks like crap. And that disappoints me somewhat, because I know and get that Carmack was going for the longevity card here, but it comes at the expense of what 99% of gamers are running now. The problem is, Megatexture tech is a bit of a memory whore, and because there are no depth sorting routines that give high-resolution priority to the objects closest to you, more often than not the things in the distance look ok, while those boxes and cans at your feet look like Quake 1 on d_mipcap 0.

John Carmack himself stated that in order to eliminate low resolution textures and texture popping, you need a graphics card that has 3GB of *unified* memory; that's not 2x1.5GB cards in SLI, mind you, but each card MUST have 3GB.

Out of the 314 nVidia Cards available on Newegg, only 4 have this much vRAM, and of those, only 3 use off-the-shelf cooling (the 4th is water cooled). These are ultra high-end 580GTX cards with non-standard vram configs, when compared to nVidia's own reference designs. ATI/AMD do have more options in that arena, but I'm not even sure if they fixed the driver screw-up so many people were struggling with. And for the record, these cards range from $490-$800. So you spend nearly 4x as much for a gaming rig that runs a game almost as nicely as a xBox 360.

That's what people are pissed off about.

I'm not saying that the engine won't look nice. It just doesn't look nearly as good as Skyrim does on your average gaming rig. With today's release of the texture pack, I expect that Skyrim will hold it's own to a decked out Rage-optimized rig as well.

Fundimentally, I get it, and I have no issue with what Carmack was trying to do. But, as a gamer, I do feel a little ripped off by all the hype that said this was going to be their biggest, deepest game yet, and then the story felt like it cut off on Chapter 3 of a 14 chapter novel.

^D^

sure the requirements are a bit steep, but so are the requirements for metro2033 which is a much nicer looking game, so is whitcher2. try to run it w/uber-sampling, or metro with proper AA so they look their best, and try to find a card that can play it at hi resolution at vsync frames, there's still no single card out there that can play it with solid vsync and proper anti aliasing.

two expensive($5-600) video cards that just came out though with 3gb of vram which will soon be the status quo, and just like when doom3 was around and the ati 9800xt came along that could actually play it with solid frames, there was a new yardstick, from the same game, and video card company too. doom3 looked tits out of the box back then, still looks alright today, but sure was a shitty game after the first hour or so. i'm seeing a pattern here. i admit rage as it is, isn't pretty in spots, but as a world to exist in for a time, it's a very compelling place visually, taken in as a whole. sort of steampunk dr seuss to my eyes, and very rich scenes, but just like doom3 rage blew it's wad early and the gameplay became work just to forward the story.

if id ever bother to do the same thing as bethesda with their supposed massive texture pack i'd probably go back for another run, much like how i'll probably risk another arrow to the knee in skyrim, but from the comparison shots, and the peasely 3gb texture pack size i'm not expecting much. perhaps when the new nvidia offerings come out in the next month or two id might find the effort worthwhile.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:Probably because the low res textures that showed up in Rage looked like they were EGA resolution, whereas Skyrim's "High res textures" only fell apart on flora.

Unless you have a 3GB card, there is no way Rage looked better than Skyrim on Ultra.

And that's coming from an admitted disciple of the Church of id Software.

i have a 2gig card on an old ass core 2 system, and it ran beautifully. it clearly wasn't well optimized, but people with video cards with less than 1gig of memory aren't really in the demographic for top releases anymore, so why bother crippling the game for people who don't keep up? clearly pc gaming isn't high on your list for you if you have much less than a 1gig vram gpu, so why should the game dev make you a priority over the entire experience of everyone else who does make it a priority? i know some people like to think their geforce 4's or radeon x850's are still relevant pieces of hardware cause they're still faster than whats in the top consoles, but thats old fart logic, and it only applies to industries that don't evolve as fast as the tech sector and all it's derivatives.

And I have a 570 card running on an i7 with 12gigs of RAM, so it's not a "tech" issue. I have more than enough horsepower to run Rage, and it still looks like crap. And that disappoints me somewhat, because I know and get that Carmack was going for the longevity card here, but it comes at the expense of what 99% of gamers are running now. The problem is, Megatexture tech is a bit of a memory whore, and because there are no depth sorting routines that give high-resolution priority to the objects closest to you, more often than not the things in the distance look ok, while those boxes and cans at your feet look like Quake 1 on d_mipcap 0.

John Carmack himself stated that in order to eliminate low resolution textures and texture popping, you need a graphics card that has 3GB of *unified* memory; that's not 2x1.5GB cards in SLI, mind you, but each card MUST have 3GB.

Out of the 314 nVidia Cards available on Newegg, only 4 have this much vRAM, and of those, only 3 use off-the-shelf cooling (the 4th is water cooled). These are ultra high-end 580GTX cards with non-standard vram configs, when compared to nVidia's own reference designs. ATI/AMD do have more options in that arena, but I'm not even sure if they fixed the driver screw-up so many people were struggling with. And for the record, these cards range from $490-$800. So you spend nearly 4x as much for a gaming rig that runs a game almost as nicely as a xBox 360.

That's what people are pissed off about.

I'm not saying that the engine won't look nice. It just doesn't look nearly as good as Skyrim does on your average gaming rig. With today's release of the texture pack, I expect that Skyrim will hold it's own to a decked out Rage-optimized rig as well.

Fundimentally, I get it, and I have no issue with what Carmack was trying to do. But, as a gamer, I do feel a little ripped off by all the hype that said this was going to be their biggest, deepest game yet, and then the story felt like it cut off on Chapter 3 of a 14 chapter novel.

Creston wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 13:10:Most regular folk don't have a clue how to create/manipulate a custom ini file, so I'm not sure that that's going to help those peeps a whole lot.

Creston

I think you're misunderstanding me, it's for mod makers to use to help declare what load order they need or to specify known conflicts so that an external tool or manipulation isn't required. It's not something users would have to edit. This is something they talked about anyway, whether they did it or not remains to be seen.

Verno wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 09:12:Actually IIRC someone at Bethesda mentioned they have a custom ini setting that can be used for load ordering at least. I'm sure Steam Workshop won't be as workable as Wyrebash but it's also intended so that regular folk can use it.

Most regular folk don't have a clue how to create/manipulate a custom ini file, so I'm not sure that that's going to help those peeps a whole lot.

Actually IIRC someone at Bethesda mentioned they have a custom ini setting that can be used for load ordering at least. I'm sure Steam Workshop won't be as workable as Wyrebash but it's also intended so that regular folk can use it.

Creston wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:13:It does nothing that Nexus Mod Manager doesn't do, except for auto-updating. On the flipside, the NMM will actually allow you to sort your mods properly, which the workshop will NOT allow you to do.

So using a ton of mods straight out of the workshop is probably a surefire way to get problems...

Creston

This guys finds a way to bitch even when there's nothing to bitch about yet. Amazing. Creston, you must be a horribly negative person.

That said, the surprise is likely an in-house made mod, likely texture pack and a few other things.

^Drag0n^ wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 20:22:Probably because the low res textures that showed up in Rage looked like they were EGA resolution, whereas Skyrim's "High res textures" only fell apart on flora.

Unless you have a 3GB card, there is no way Rage looked better than Skyrim on Ultra.

And that's coming from an admitted disciple of the Church of id Software.

i have a 2gig card on an old ass core 2 system, and it ran beautifully. it clearly wasn't well optimized, but people with video cards with less than 1gig of memory aren't really in the demographic for top releases anymore, so why bother crippling the game for people who don't keep up? clearly pc gaming isn't high on your list for you if you have much less than a 1gig vram gpu, so why should the game dev make you a priority over the entire experience of everyone else who does make it a priority? i know some people like to think their geforce 4's or radeon x850's are still relevant pieces of hardware cause they're still faster than whats in the top consoles, but thats old fart logic, and it only applies to industries that don't evolve as fast as the tech sector and all it's derivatives.

Jerykk wrote on Feb 7, 2012, 01:00:The key difference between Skyrim and RAGE is that you can actually interact with what you see in Skyrim. See something interesting off in the distance? You can go there and take a closer look. See a really nice looking fork on a table? You can take it or throw it or sell it. The visuals in RAGE are just that; visuals. You can't interact with any of the details in the environment and you can't explore the pretty scenery you see in the distance. It doesn't matter how nice an environment looks if you can't have any meaningful interactions with it.

yes, but just because i can interact with more stuff doesn't mean i'd want to bother after the first few items, considering they're nearly all insignificant, which is the problem making a game with that much object depth, nothing matters anymore, unlike the interactions with people in rage or gta4, but i get it, you can collect 100000 cheese rolls and make a bunch of them avalanche down a hill, thats not a game to me though it's an outlet for OCD. rage was a rail shooter, i never read anywhere previously it was destined to be anything else, not denying the possibility anyone was claiming it to be an open world game at early development, but wtf do you expect from ID? what game have they made previously that you'd expect it to be much different than it was? quake? RTCW? where is the open world production history for you to expect anything more? sure they screwed up a bunch of the porting, but it was less of a hackjob than skyrim imo, and i think alot of the gripes come from people who just don't dig the art style more than anything else. there were plenty of terrible textures in skyrim as well fyi, lots, even in the opening sequence, along with the mountains that are made from 5 sided polygons once you're less than 10km away. the mountain backdrops were pretty in doom for it's day as well, always wanted to go outside the compounds and check em out, but the hardware of the day was insufficient, sadly today it seems the programming acumen is not up to the task in the current talent pool, or at least the purse strings are too tight to allow it to happen.

it's all par for the course in pc gaming these days tho, the real talent and heart have long since left any of the top dev houses imo. just a million monkeys on a million keyboards. there's more art and soul in the 64k razor1911 demoscene videos than half these copy n paste profit cows. check out the 64k videos on youtube. impressive stuff, a taste of what actual inspiration can do, when it's not hindered by the greedy cogs in the machine. we're capable of alot more, and it's just another sad piece of evidence how the least amongst us are in charge of things.

However 'niche' pc gaming might have become it is still a competing platform for sales in video games, and to say that the pricing on that platform has no impact on the amount of sales on other platforms is simply short-sighted. Couple that with the fact that you have many more options down the road when you're playing a moddable PC version, and I'd say the PC release was more of a bargain than any console version.

The PC version is almost always a better deal than the console versions. Higher resolutions, higher framerates, higher AF, higher AA, better controls, tweaks, mods, lower prices... the list goes on and on. However, console gamers don't care about that stuff. They care about accessibility and convenience. They care about what platform their friends are getting the game on. If console gamers actually cared about which version of the game was the best (both in terms of quality and pricing), they'd be PC gamers. That's why the price of PC games doesn't affect console sales.

As for people complaining about Skyrim's quality as a port, many of their complaints are justified. The game was terribly optimized on release and it took Bethesda three months to fix that. The UI was terrible out of the box, failing to take advantage of most of the benefits of M/KB and Bethesda has yet to fix that. It doesn't take much for a port to better on PC than on consoles. Throwing in higher resolutions, AA, etc, takes minimal effort. And getting it to run nicely is easy when the game was designed for 6-year-old hardware. Almost all ports do these things. A great port, on the other hand, goes above and beyond these basics. Bioware has always made great ports, adding new features, redesigning the UI and rebalancing the game specifically for PC to ensure that PC gaming hardware is actually taken advantage of.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion".

The key difference between Skyrim and RAGE is that you can actually interact with what you see in Skyrim. See something interesting off in the distance? You can go there and take a closer look. See a really nice looking fork on a table? You can take it or throw it or sell it. The visuals in RAGE are just that; visuals. You can't interact with any of the details in the environment and you can't explore the pretty scenery you see in the distance. It doesn't matter how nice an environment looks if you can't have any meaningful interactions with it.

Simply charge less on PC for the *exact* same game that is on consoles, with higher resolution settings? That is ridiculous, they would hurt their own sales on their target platform but undercutting it with a cheaper version on PC. Makes no business sense at all.

That's not really true at all. Most PC games already have an MSRP that's $10-20 lower than the console versions. Even when all versions have the same MSRP, PC games go on sale more quickly and more often than console games. For example, I was able to pre-order the PC version of Saints Row 3 for about $30. You couldn't do that with the console versions. I believe I could have pre-ordered The Darkness 2 for around $35 at one point as well.

So no, the price of the PC version of any multiplatform game has no impact whatsoever on sales of the console versions.

Then we shall agree that we disagree on this =)

Physical copies on all platforms with skyrim had the same MSRP on release, the pc will always see sales and cheaper prices quicker because of the now wide-spread nature of digital downloads. Yes you can get a digital download version on sale on pc quicker, but in my opinion it should be quicker because no money is spent on physical materials or shipping for the game.

However 'niche' pc gaming might have become it is still a competing platform for sales in video games, and to say that the pricing on that platform has no impact on the amount of sales on other platforms is simply short-sighted. Couple that with the fact that you have many more options down the road when you're playing a moddable PC version, and I'd say the PC release was more of a bargain than any console version.

I was just saying that whining over it not being a proper "PC Game" with 2gb textures and such when you're getting the best version of a great game in the first place, makes a person sound like they have some serious entitlement issues, and it's a trend I hear in the "hard core PC gamer" community too much.

To hear this, even when being treated to exclusive benefits after release by the developer because they choose to acknowledge that they could have done better with that platform/version, reminds me that too many people out there in the 1st world probably don't have enough to worry about in their lives. (yes, I went there.)

Have you tried it? I'm looking around and can't find any info on that.

No, it's not available yet, but from the information I've seen it's simply a Mod storefront (so to speak) and download/update package. It'll work fine with a few small mods, but if you start putting overhauls in there, it's going to get messy pretty quickly...

I could be wrong, of course. I would imagine that Bethesda is at least AWARE of such potential issues, but at the same time, getting mods to play nice with each other can be a massive undertaking, which is why things such as Wrye Bash came out.

I don't see the Steam workshop just automatically sorting out all your mod issues. (and to be fair, it's not like NMM does it automatically either, but at least it offers you help in getting it to work.)

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:48:hmm i might actually bother playing more than 3 hours of skyrim if they do this right. rage looked far, far better than skyrim, unless you played both on consoles, or rage didn't run properly like it seems to have for some ppl, but getting things to work right is part of pc gaming. get used to it or get on the console short bus.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion". try to look at skyrim after without feeling like it's devoid of any detail or life, there's just no atmosphere at all. skyrim reminds me of playing a dx7 game coming from other titles like witcher2, rage, gta4. basically anything from the past 3-4 years, and worse, unlike rage, there is absolutely no redeeming style to the art in skyrim there is no distinct style at all, it just looks like generic mmo art from 4 years ago. skyrim has a tonne of things rage did not, and vice versa. rage looks and feels good with immersive characters, who are actually talking to you with their mouths(what an amazing concept), but a short, n shitty climactic sequence, where skyrim is incredibly fugly, millions of poorly drawn un-interesting characters, but chalk full of stuff, a never ending list of stuff, miles and miles and miles of stuff... boring... boring stuff. quality over quantity for me thanks.

You can't even compare Rage and Skyrim graphically, they are two very different games in every sense. Rage had many, many low res textures all over the place but that's not what most people didn't like about it.

TurdFergasun wrote on Feb 6, 2012, 18:48:hmm i might actually bother playing more than 3 hours of skyrim if they do this right. rage looked far, far better than skyrim, unless you played both on consoles, or rage didn't run properly like it seems to have for some ppl, but getting things to work right is part of pc gaming. get used to it or get on the console short bus.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion". try to look at skyrim after without feeling like it's devoid of any detail or life, there's just no atmosphere at all. skyrim reminds me of playing a dx7 game coming from other titles like witcher2, rage, gta4. basically anything from the past 3-4 years, and worse, unlike rage, there is absolutely no redeeming style to the art in skyrim there is no distinct style at all, it just looks like generic mmo art from 4 years ago. skyrim has a tonne of things rage did not, and vice versa. rage looks and feels good with immersive characters, who are actually talking to you with their mouths(what an amazing concept), but a short, n shitty climactic sequence, where skyrim is incredibly fugly, millions of poorly drawn un-interesting characters, but chalk full of stuff, a never ending list of stuff, miles and miles and miles of stuff... boring... boring stuff. quality over quantity for me thanks.

Probably because the low res textures that showed up in Rage looked like they were EGA resolution, whereas Skyrim's "High res textures" only fell apart on flora.

Unless you have a 3GB card, there is no way Rage looked better than Skyrim on Ultra.

And that's coming from an admitted disciple of the Church of id Software.

hmm i might actually bother playing more than 3 hours of skyrim if they do this right. rage looked far, far better than skyrim, unless you played both on consoles, or rage didn't run properly like it seems to have for some ppl, but getting things to work right is part of pc gaming. get used to it or get on the console short bus.

how the hell can complain about the scattered low res textures in rage, but love the entire low res scenes of skyrim? go play gta 4 with how much shit is going on around you, and in the smallest details, the great textures almost everywhere, and it suffered from consolitis worse than either of these two games. same with rage, the scenery looks alive if you have the settings right, and it all helps the big buzzword "immersion". try to look at skyrim after without feeling like it's devoid of any detail or life, there's just no atmosphere at all. skyrim reminds me of playing a dx7 game coming from other titles like witcher2, rage, gta4. basically anything from the past 3-4 years, and worse, unlike rage, there is absolutely no redeeming style to the art in skyrim there is no distinct style at all, it just looks like generic mmo art from 4 years ago. skyrim has a tonne of things rage did not, and vice versa. rage looks and feels good with immersive characters, who are actually talking to you with their mouths(what an amazing concept), but a short, n shitty climactic sequence, where skyrim is incredibly fugly, millions of poorly drawn un-interesting characters, but chalk full of stuff, a never ending list of stuff, miles and miles and miles of stuff... boring... boring stuff. quality over quantity for me thanks.

I think I said it earlier; minimalist UI aside, this game is giganenormous and has very deep gameplay. I have over 250 hours into the game, and I'm STILL finding new locations and major quests.

I'm not sure I'd call the gameplay deep. There's definitely a ton of content but most of it is pretty shallow. Quests in particular are almost completely linear. There are so many lost opportunities for branching paths and interesting moral choices.